Have something to say?

Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

We are preparing Kubuntu Vivid Vervet (15.04) for distribution on April 23rd, 2015. With this Beta 1 pre-release, you can see what we are trying out in preparation for our next (stable) version. We have some interesting things happening, so read on for highlights and information.

Canonical published its Ubuntu Porting Guide just a week ago and it will help developers bring the operating system to other devices than just Nexus 4 and BQ's Aquaris, but it looks like an Ubuntu Touch for OnePlus One porting project was started well before that.

I created Puppy Linux back in 2003, but there was never a toolchain for compiling Puppy completely from source. Instead, Puppy is built from binary packages of another distro, plus PET packages compiled natively. We did use the T2 system right back at Puppy v2. In early 2015, I tackled the formidable task of compiling everything in T2, and I had to introduce 105 new packages into T2. It took a couple of months, but I eventually was able to compile every package required for Quirky.

After two years of hard work, the Xfce development team had the pleasure of announcing a few minutes ago, February 28, the immediate and general availability of the highly anticipated Xfce 4.12 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

Monohm unveiled a disk-shaped “Runcible” smartphone running Firefox OS. The camera-equipped device is notable for its chilled-out UI and modular construction. The Runcible will launch in the second half of the year through Japanese carrier KDDI, which has invested in Berkeley, Calif. startup Monohm, Inc. The company name combines the Japanese word “mono” or “object,” […]

We are happy to announce the release of final version 2.9 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of changes which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.

Tails, the secure live-boot Linux made famous by Edward Snowden, has had a major revision release to Version 1.3. The new version, released after testing since February 12, combines various security fixes with new apps and simplified install, the developers say.

Was that former Linux Outlaw Dan Lynch on FLOSS Weekly 326 earlier this week? It most certainly was. Dan joins regular host Randall Schwartz in talking about the Open Source Initiative with Simon Phipps and Patrick Masson in this particular episode, which is well worth a watch. It’s always great to see Randall on his show, and it’s great that he has such fantastic “guest help” from time to time.

The Ubuntu Kylin 15.04 Beta 1 (Vivid Vervet) operating system has also been released alongside the Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, and Ubuntu MATE distributions, bringing a wide range of improvements, numerous updated components, as well as the usual bug fixes. We took the distribution for a test drive and created a nice screenshot tour for all users of the Chinese Ubuntu community.

Welcome to the Opensource.com Weekly Top 5!
Do you want to know how the magic happens? It's not rocket science of course, but I thought you might like to know how I make the Weekly Top 5 video and article for you every week.
read more

Google has open-sourced something called “gRPC” that it says represents “a brand new framework for handling remote procedure calls” using HTTP/2. The Chocolate Factory says it has dogfooded gRPC on its own microservices and that it “enables easy creation of highly performant, scalable APIs and microservices” and offers “bandwidth and CPU efficient, low latency way to create massively distributed systems that span data centers, as well as power mobile apps, real-time communications, IoT devices and APIs.”

GE unveiled a rugged COM Express Type 10 Mini module that runs Linux on a 2GHz Tegra K1 and offers soldered 2GB RAM and support for CUDA and VisionWorks. GE’s Intelligent Platforms business, a division of GE Energy Management headquartered in Charlottesville, Va., is primarily focused on the military/aerospace segment. The 84 x 55mm mCOM10K1 computer-on-module, which conforms to the COM Express Type 10 “Mini” form factor, is designed in part for SWaP-constrained mil/aero applications like image and video processing, sensor processing and electronic warfare. However, it also has broader applications in industrial Internet and Internet of Things applications, says GE. These are said to include industrial process automation, automotive and transportation, and medical imaging.

Writebox is a simple text editor that provides almost no features. Despite this, it's one of the simplest and most trustworthy WYSIWYG text editors around if you just want something simple for writing.